I just got some stats from my Swedish university about how many have applied for Chinese and Japanese beginners classes this year. For Chinese that where only 50 and for Japanese it where 500. The interesting part is that the Chinese government claims that 40 million non Chinese students studied Chinese 2012 (around 2 million of them are from Japan). Japanese government said at the same time that 2,3 million non Japanese people did study Japanese. I do not think that Sweden is that different to other non Asian countries so those numbers are strange. Even though most people study outside of the university world it should not be this big difference. Another side of this. In my Chinese classes the students mostly study for career opportunities while my Japanese classes seems to have students who mostly just find Japanese "Cool". This is interesting since it is getting harder and harder to get a work permit in China. Not impossible but harder. Se this article. China doesn't want you: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-06-07/in-china-expats-find-job-opportunities-are-scant The very same i can see in my office as well.

agree: as soon as you finish your study at a chinese university the first question is: ni shenme shihou huiguo= when will you leave the country and go back where you came from.

maybe it will take a while that china changes that attitude.
or maybe this will never happen. who knows.

anoher aspect is that if you work in china the natives first question is: why did you come to china - cant you find work in your own country?

.................and businessweek.com is.....

guess what......

BLOCKED! (in beijing/ china)

In most major Cities the government currently conducts validation of foreigners work permits. Since you need at least a Bachelor degree to work many are send home. Some that have used faked degrees are actually black listed for life in China so they can never return. Even the business license the company need for an expat is getting harder to obtain, not to mention renew. Still, you do need to be in China to work with China. I have not seen those problems in Japan though. I got my work permit in Japan in days. Took me 3 month in China.

how did you get your work permit in china without a company who hired you?

I work for Volvo so they do that for me but it still takes time to get the permission for them and after that I do my part and get my work permit. My part is fast but the employers part takes some time now.

from what i saw at university the main crowd of foreign students in china is nowadays from indonesia, thailand and japan.
there are a few from europe (italy, germany)and the u.s.
phillippinos have a hard time to get the visa due to the current crisis.

Maybe some of it also has to do with the learning curve for Japanese being so easy at the beginning and Chinese being so hard.

Maybe wages of young foreigners in Japan are higher than in China. Niether is particularly easy to break into for your average American/European with average life goals and expectations, I think (I've lived and worked in China on and off since 2006).

i guess it might also be the bad reputation that china has in western media.

as a result young westerners who come to china themselves are culture-"shocked" when they see that life in china is actually possible and kind of fun with all the new things around you.

The University in England I worked at and the University I studied at have similar stats, one only went up to level 1 Chinese and had three classes, Japanese was up to level 2 but was a lot more popular. The other Uni went up to level 2 but had around 30 students, while Japanese was up to level 4 and had about 500 students.

The people around where I live (Zhuhai珠海）love having foreigners around but I've had a horrible time trying to get my work VISA sorted. If they ask me if I can't find work in my own country. I have the "no" answer ready.

I always find it interesting when people (/and companies) go on about how difficult it is for foreigners to get visas and how the regulations are tightening.

It was a major super serious pain in the ass to get my company registered but, since I've been registered, getting a visa for myself has been ridiculously simple.

This year, according to his time sheet, renewing my visa took about 5 hours of my personal assistant's time including busses to and from the various government offices. Start (renewing the work certificate) to finish (picking up my passport from the PSB) took him a week.

Getting a visa for my new foreign hire was quite a bit harder because she was changing from Expert's Certificate to Employment Certificate, and initially didn't have any documentation to show that she'd been working for me as a part time translator (eventually found a government publication where she was credited as a proofreader). Even so, the process was about two weeks long.

If it takes three months to get a proper working visa for a foreigner it's because someone doesn't have the right documentation or doesn't know what they are doing. Follow the rules to the strictest from the very beginning and when Beijing "tightens down" by announcing that "henceforth we're actually going to start following our rules" and things are easy peasy.